Burnt Nerves
by crackinthecup
Summary: It started with the forging of the collar, though Mairon did not suspect Melkor's intent at the time. A summons to the throne room elucidates his master's machinations. Angbang. Warnings inside.


**A/N:** 1\. My half of an art/fic collaboration with the lovely angbang-in-angband (Tumblr), who has kindly provided a coma-inducing illustration of the fic.

2\. The title is borrowed from Sylvia Plath's _Waking in Winter_.

 **Warnings:** dub-con/non-con; suspension bondage; caning; piercings; orgasm denial.

* * *

No explanation had been offered. Merely a prod against his mind, a spear with a little droplet of an image upon its very tip: the throne room of Angband. And, as ever, Mairon had obeyed the summons.

His boots squeaked to a midmost halt, and Melkor's palm imprinted the command upon the air one more superfluous heartbeat before sprawling back down. It was a clockwork mechanism. Mairon tossed his head out of his bow and waited for his lord to speak, casting a practiced eye not upon his visage, but upon the dark expanse of cloth over his chest. From shadowed arches high above metal tinkled, and the Maia restrained the upward sweep of his eyes.

The distance between them sharpened the hint of teeth in Melkor's smile, and a tingle swayed from the knobs of Mairon's spine at the sight. Palming something in his pocket, his master stood, stood as darkness might creep in a devouring ooze from some putrid hollow; black rope laughed through his fingers, a storm of his power locked the doors, and Mairon _understood_.

A backward step broke out of him. Yet Melkor _seeped_ into him, and although capillaries cracked beneath his fingers as they wrenched at his lieutenant's upper arm, the Vala's smile only slanted all the more predatory.

"Have you requested permission to move?"

"No, my lord," Mairon admitted through the drumbeat of his heart. Melkor's other hand flurried over his cheek, the heel of his palm cupping his chin, and the Maia's eyes were hooked upward.

"However shall we deal with you?" the Vala mused, he tutted, and Mairon punctiliously crushed his input beneath the flat of his tongue, a tang as of grape seeds bitter in his mouth— _let us not, my lord_. Melkor pressed both thumb and gaze to his lieutenant's lips, dragging them apart, and the Maia's tongue flickered against charred flesh; the bitterness sweetened, and with an avalanche of laughter low in his throat Melkor slipped his thumb between Mairon's teeth.

And then the Maia was standing there with slick lips, staring not at his master's lightning gaze, but at the gauntness of the throne.

"Disrobe for me." And, as ever, Mairon obeyed. He did not turn around to face his lord; with only threadbare hesitation he let his garments eddy over the floor, one by one, meticulous in this if denied in everything else. And from behind him Melkor loosed not a murmur—not even when Mairon gleamed golden-skinned and golden-haired amidst shadows as ravenous as their master. Not a murmur as chill gathered close, wafting over the Maia's skin; not until Mairon pursed his lips to quell the tremble of the Vala's name.

The scratch of fingers at his wrists was both relief and lightning bolt. His arms were pinioned at the small of his back, and he heard the remaining feet of rope swoosh over carpeted rock. Steered by Melkor's grip upon his shoulders, he gyrated, he looked up into those mirror-maze eyes once more, and a tap of fingers against his lips held him in place.

"Let us see what else that tongue of yours can do,'' the Vala purred and the command was plain. Mairon did not hesitate again as he dropped to his knees. Fingers combed the hair from his face, and the Maia might have supposed it a distraction if the collar Melkor extracted from his robes had not riveted every wisp of thought. It glinted golden and horrific, and with a punch of realization cramping nauseous in his stomach, Mairon recognized his own hand at work; an extravagance, or so it had been waved away by his master when he had commissioned it, and though he had searched, the Maia had found no reason to question his explanation; fey was his master and surely no neck could bear the weight of a collar wrought of gold—what purpose could fretting have served? So unsuspecting and jubilant in his labor Mairon had molded the gold, adorned every exterior facet with needling spikes, peppered the inner surface with tiny, blunt teeth.

It was the fastidious knowledge of that bluntness that quietened the Maia's pulse out of its gallop. The collar snicked shut around his neck. Mairon's shoulders sagged with its heaviness, those small points of gold prodded at his skin in discomfort he had not fancied while crafting them; but he remained silent, he remained still, and Melkor smiled a warm, withering glow of a smile.

Mairon tensed as he watched him burrow into his robes again. That tension transmuted into a shiver, little rills of something he would never dare to call anticipation cresting beneath his skin, as his master extended to him on flattened palm a ring cast in gold; this too had been forged by his own hand, yet not upon his lord's command. The Maia picked it up, and joy preened in his chest with the ripple of torchlight over its seamless polish. _Perfect_. Deftly he fitted his sac through the aperture, care merely a perfunctory reminder somewhere in the back of his mind after so many repetitions. And meanwhile Melkor simply admired, simply drank him in, eyes trailing the wriggle of the ring up his lieutenant's soft length, fixing upon its glimmer flush against the curls nesting over his pelvis. Mairon then looked up with no pause for consideration, and _beautiful_ , his master cooed in his mind, intimate as rain streaming over bare skin, welling into twin splotches of crimson on the Maia's cheeks even as his lord twisted at the clasps upon his own robes.

"There," the Vala praised as forced by no hand his lieutenant dipped his head and tightened his lips about the crown of Melkor's erection. "So you can be a good boy after all."

Either reverence or objection might have pulsed out of Mairon's throat; Melkor felt it as a quiver at the root of his cock, eliciting a groan from deep within his core. Yet where the Maia expected a blackened fist to tangle in his roots and yank him into his master's pelvis, Melkor did no more than hook lax fingers through the collar. Freely was Mairon permitted to move; his lips brushed down to his master's base of their own accord, and heat surged between his hipbones in earnest, tightening the clasp of the ring. And on an upstroke, just as his tongue flicked over the Vala's slit to lap at the fluid beaded there, a gentle tug upon the collar coaxed him into stillness. The taste clung.

Disappointment corrugated between his brows as his master tucked himself back into his robes.

"Lie down."

Confusion hauled his mind into a standstill, and the grooves deepened to a frown. "My lord?"

"On your stomach, Mairon," his master sighed, and the Maia's jaw spasmed. He knew what Melkor expected, what he _wanted_ ; like a film of sour milk the words, the _plea_ for help, stuck to his tongue. He was on the verge of spitting them out when he caught sight of the smirk sawed over the Vala's countenance; he pressed his lips together, but was quite unable to rein in his flinch when Melkor swooped into a crouch at his side. Yet his master's fingers were but a susurrus of ruined flesh at his shoulders, lowering him upon a patch of rug; Cimmerian it was, torchlight splashing over it and reflecting as in a lake, and the magma writhing through rocky fissures beneath their feet heated it to a glow. The Vala smeared his fingers down, down over his thighs, widening them into a lewd splay; there Melkor locked them with a metal bar fastened between the Maia's knees, a bar that had been lying just to the side, that Mairon had not spotted as it had waited there so insidiously, and for how long had his master been planning this?

Ropes, ropes, ropes—the Vala secured them to a crude iron reinterpretation of Mairon's collar ticking upon a chain, and in a jungle they nutated, they coiled around his arms, his chest, crisscrossing into a chafe over each nipple. His master undid the bonds at his wrists to loop the rope about his waist; his hands were once more captured, immobilized, his ankles hefted toward the swell of his ass and there Melkor cinched the knots. Mairon felt himself no more than a puppet of flesh and blood and fire as his limbs were showcased, and he allowed his master his whim; he allowed it, because the alternative foundered beneath the thunder of arousal; because there was no alternative at all.

And when he was inched upward by his master's hand upon a lever, by the chain shortening with a mad shriek of mirth, by ropes snapping taut—he felt his body bobbing, and swaying, and floating. Melkor's fingers carded through his hair, soothing his lurching stomach, and there was something soft, soft as a rotten plum, that hazed over his mind then; in a gentle touch the Vala separated his hair into strands, weaving them together in a loose languid braid, and gauzy contentment fluttered within him.

Yet reality crystallized, it sharpened and _splintered_ when his master reached within his robes for a hook golden as the collar dragging down his neck; it was bulbous at one end, tapering into an eyelet at the other, and in panic enough to mask the sick flare of desire low in his belly, Mairon _twisted_ —amidst rasping ropes he plummeted into a sea-like heave that Melkor observed with relish.

His vision dizzied over the floor, the rug zigzagging in and out of eyesight, and he did not care that he was thankful when fingers at his chin helped his head lift from the burden of the collar. The golden sphere was the size of an egg, he noted now, as it nudged against his lips and found them pliant. The Vala's fingers grazed upward to cradle his cheek as he opened his mouth, as he curled his tongue around the ball. ''You know what to do.''

Mairon's moan clattered against his master's crooning murmur. The little orb slid further into his mouth, and he hollowed his cheeks around it, he rolled it with his tongue, earning the Vala's grinned approval. It popped out past his lips with an obscene sound, and as Melkor prowled round, soldering himself to his hip, he willed the tension from his muscles; he willed his body slack as the hook caught upon his entrance, as his master's fingers squeezed his buttocks apart. Yet it was cool, and slick, and the Maia could not but clench as his master pivoted it in, slowly, slowly, each wrench several skittering heartbeats and a darker tint blooming over his cheeks; he stuttered out his breaths with the stretch and the fullness and oh— _oh_ , he mewled, hips canting backward, _oh_ as the sphere snuggled against that sparking warren of nerves.

And then the pressure slithered away, Melkor forcing the ball back to his rim in a burn, and his thighs strained, and quaked, but the bar forced them wide. The shallow thrusts the Vala palmed upon the hook propelled him into a pendulum swing. His jaw loosened with the heat bubbling at the root of his length, the returning prod of the sphere; and a gasp scurried past his teeth as Melkor wound his plait around one hand, working the end through the eyelet and fastening it into tautness with a curl of ribbon—his head was jerked back, his hips were forced upward into an _impossible_ curve, and through the inflamed, sagging throb of his neck within the collar, he groaned at the gape of his entrance around the hook.

The sound wavered into a whine as the Vala crushed into his vision, as fingers rubbed over his nipples, pinching and swiveling the tiny golden ring threaded through each nub. Weights were clipped onto each piercing in an aching pull of flesh, and spurred by the pain, arousal tunneled deeper into his belly. His cock hung between his legs, turgid within the bite of metal, and over the swell of veins his master tickled his fingers, straying up to the ring peeking from his tip.

"Wait—" he had begun to say, to plead, as his lord's intent smashed like a punch to the stomach, but the weight was already drooping, his crown bobbing downward with its burden; and before even a whisper of protest could whisk into his mind, Melkor's hand was flashing to the vise of gold about the base of his shaft and yet another weight was tugging downward, tugging the ring into cutting pressure.

Fingers clawed over his face, and he felt like he might crumble, like he might erupt into sparks as hammer-struck metal. And when a sliver of silk was knotted at the back of his head, when his vision strayed into darkness and his master's hand at his hip launched him into oscillation, he truly did crumble into a whirlwind of a question:

"My lord?" he called, but no answer came. The weights swung as though tolling out merriment, and he tensed with their lurch on sensitive flesh; it only served to stab the hook further into that scintilla of nerve endings, and for fractured, roiling minutes (hours or days or months or years—Mairon knew nothing but mad, shrieking physicality), sheer _sensation_ scratched against his skull as a knitting wound that prickled and throbbed and demanded, and bloodied each pass of obliging nails. His head would have lolled, for his neck felt curved, battered out of all natural shape by the collar, but the arch of his back became too strenuous, his shoulders cramped in their twist behind his back.

And Melkor watched. Against the wall he luxuriated, one hand stroking over his own arousal with slow, lazy surety, as his lieutenant writhed and suffered and moaned. The Maia bucked his hips to cajole the sphere into firmer pressure, yet each time the nudge mellowed and he could hear his master's amusement as nails chittering over his bones. Although desire percussed up his cock, although it purpled and swelled and nodded, he could not spill; the tug on his nipples was not quite enough; his master's taste still on his lips from what seemed like a lifetime ago did not goad him into climax, but into frenzied, frothing distraction; and even if stimulation could simmer into a boil, his length felt cinched so tightly that he doubted himself capable of anything but implosion. So his need could only weep, stain white and glutinous over the dark weave of the rug, and gleeful was the slope of his master's stare, the pleased flutter of his eyelids, as he canted his hips into his own fist.

"Please," Mairon chanted, "my lord," he beseeched, yet to silence were his syllables shoveled. His own sordid sounds ricocheted off the walls to slice into his eardrums; a sob wailed up to the ceiling, a keen as Mairon shook in his bonds; the hook bored deeper, and with ears clogged by the hurtle of blood, the Maia did not hear his lord's approach—not until a wooden cane settled against his ass, and though the contact was but light, he nonetheless flinched away from its horrible, wondrous implications.

What air had managed to claw down his trachea screeched back into a yelp as Melkor flicked the cane against his flesh in a sting and a smack; he reeled and the weights reeled with him, the hook was swallowed deeper. Strikes pitter-pattered over his buttocks, filliping the skin into superficial rosiness, and behind the blindfold his eyelids shuttered with the misty, flowing delight of the Vala's rhythm, noises he was but half aware of floating from his lips as tiny hats upon the breeze.

And then his master was ripping the stick from him, whistling it back down in a concussion of star-bright force. The pleasant thrum flared into a burn, a forest-fire crackled over his backside, and he could feel the ache of an incipient bruise scrabbling beneath his skin—he wanted to scream; but from his dangling lips only a breathless burst of air was torn, a guttural animal growl scratching despair into his throat, and weights and hook and collar—all were subsumed beneath the bursting, speckling pain. Again and again the cane scythed, and stripes of crimson seeped into bloodied pools, into heat unpeeling from his distressed flesh.

Mairon would have begged; but his vocal cords could vibrate into no more than struggling whimpers, and the Vala's voice wounded as much as the cane: ''Do stopper these indecorous noises, Mairon. You were pleading for my touch mere moments ago.''

So he allowed tears to soak through the blindfold, he allowed the wide seesaw of his body to addle through his skull; and through it all, through the whoosh and the clout and the agony, that visceral, cringing clench, that screw of a facial expression, and the hook rammed deeper than it should ever have been able to.

And when his master had done, when the cane rolled with a laughably innocuous thud across the floor, the Maia drooped and sobbed the gashing throb from his buttocks. Tiny, whining breaths bleated from him as Melkor's hands reached for his bruising flesh, helpless and twitching he was beneath his kneading fingers, and—

"Hush now," his master soothed, fingers wrapping round the hook in a gentle tug. "Hush, little one. You're all right."

And, as ever, the familiar tender lilt of the Vala's voice nestled and pulsed with warmth along his breastbone, and he breathed a little easier for it; he breathed through each prod and pull of the hook as Melkor eased it out of him, loosening the eyelet from his hair and letting it crack to the floor. The bar between his knees followed suit, and it was with relief that Mairon closed his thighs, salving the quiver that blistered through his muscles.

Yet ill-advised proved his relief; he ought to have known better. For his master's fingers were scooping up his thighs, spreading them once more into a violent shudder around the Vala's waist. A whimper ruptured in the air as he felt Melkor's tip at his entrance, felt the easy yawn of muscle around his master's slickened length. He could fight with the collar no more; neck and head were hauled downward and he did not struggle against the slide of robes over the shivering skin of his inner thighs, the sear across his buttocks as Melkor worked himself in to the hilt.

A push upon the backside and he was flying, gliding forward only to be impaled upon his master's cock on each downswing. It was an indolent coupling. Each time the Vala nearly slipped from him completely, and the stretch always burned as new, burned through to the lowermost point of his abdomen. His voice had been sanded down to something hoarse and jagged and primal; broken were his mewls, hurled all rugged and frayed across the hall as though they might reach through the void of his vision toward his master.

And when Melkor latched onto the ropes girding his hips, when he wrenched him into stillness and plunged into a pounding, slapping rhythm, he blubbered out his need—only so that the Vala might sneer, might hunch over his back with thrusts angled to unravel him, with profanities husked like a scraping blade over the helix of his ear: "This is where you belong. We ought to make this a permanent arrangement. You would enjoy that, would you not? You would enjoy dangling all splayed and dripping for my use.''

It was just as well that Melkor was expecting no reply; for the Maia had not enough breath to pack into words. And when ashen fingers reached around to barrel up his straining length, to scratch through the viscous droplets smattered over his crown, tiny battering rams of sound heaved from him, shocking the stoniness out of the hall until it felt like all the world was watching—but Mairon did not care; flesh was cleaving from bone, of that much he was certain; foiled ecstasy churned and howled within him, and at the moment he felt he would not much mind if his cock truly were to snap off. A plea gurgled in his throat, hopelessly hopeful in the frenzy of his need, and at last, _at last_ —

The Vala was guiding the ring free of his lieutenant's length, and Mairon was coming, shattering with a shard of a shout, caring not for any who might hear, only for the pump of fingers up his shaft, the fullness of his master inside him. Seed throbbed out of him, splattering down to crust over the weight still keeling from his tip, over the carpet far, far below. The Maia contorted, rope creaked and metal tittered, and Melkor continued to fuck him at a hard, unforgiving angle.

Mairon's climax crunched eternal, convulsing like a dying star—he was surprised to find himself still encased within flesh as slowly he trembled back into awareness, limp within his bonds. The Vala had mellowed into languorous thrusts, thrusts that tasted and savored, and protest at the continued stimulation was a mangled thing in his lieutenant's throat; his thighs juddered out their misuse, his nipples were plucked sore, his cock altogether too heavy. Fluid continued to drool from his slit as Melkor caressed against the packet of nerves deep within him, and he whined weakly with the thinning of pleasure into needles.

His master draped himself close once more, and nosed his question down the side of his neck, down to the prongs upon the collar: ''Have you anything to say, little Maia?''

''I can't – stop, please, it—''

Melkor caught the lobe of his ear between his teeth, nibbling a gasp out of him. And when he spoke his words seemed not of breath but of honey, drooling over Mairon's lips and sealing them shut. ''Oh, Mairon, are you not my lieutenant? Are you not sworn to service me as I deem seemly? Would you disappoint in your duty?''

 _No, no, no_ —lieutenant he was indeed, and proudly he clasped the title to him, lambent as a lantern beneath his heart; and his place as lieutenant was not with legs spread and cheeks aflush. But it was his master's will, and the demurral savored of _yes_ as it rolled over his tongue; or it might have simply been Melkor's taste he had so readily lapped up.

"Look at you,'' the Vala gloated as he straightened, hips pummeling fractionally faster. ''How sweetly you yield, how pliant you are to the touch. My, my, anyone would declare you _crave_ my cock within you.''

Fingers scuttled to the nape of his neck and squeezed, and Melkor was spiraling past his peak, hot and viscous within him, and _seemly_ , the thought distorted his ribcage, a jackknife around every heartbeat, _where he belonged_.

He always waited for the stillness afterward. Waited as he would for a shy wolf pup to clamber from its mother's teat; like he was not expecting it one bit. Melkor's touch gentled, coddled, and as metal glowing vermilion he became malleable beneath it; he did not need to think. He was silent when Melkor glided from him; it still felt like loss, even after millennia uncounted.

The world must have come to a standstill, as after a tumble of snow; for nothing of it filtered through Mairon's blanketed awareness, nothing save his master's touch handling him so gingerly, lowering him upon the carpet, loosening the ropes, the blindfold, the collar, the weights.

"I can walk," he mumbled, failing to twitch one finger into motion, as the Vala squatted down to help him off the ground.

"I know,'' Melkor smiled, brushing saffron locks off his brow; all the same, he hovered close as Mairon pieced himself into an upright position, skirting a hand over his waist as his lieutenant's legs almost quaked into a topple.

Yet the Maia could not walk. Tottering steps would have sent him scrunching to the floor had his master not drawn him into his arms. He nuzzled into the scoop of Melkor's shoulder, arms loose about his waist, and the Vala was content to merely hold him as the straggling sounds of the fortress droned in among the soft stir of their breaths.


End file.
